Circuit Design on a Budget
In our first Day, we will briefly look at the design process from concept to PCB and will introduce our class project. We will look at the process for getting and installing each of the tools on our computers. We will then set our goal -- getting a finished PCB manufactured from our week's work.
In our second class we will establish the parameters for our finished circuit. Based on the specifications that we laid out in the first class, we will start our component selection, checking our supplier for availability and deciding on our packaging. We will compare the packaging selections to our established board area to confirm fit before we move forward.
In our third class we will use the parts we selected to create the circuit for our product. Using the symbols from our selected bill of materials (BOM), we will lay out the schematic for our product. We will show the steps for both EDA tools (CircuitStudio and KiCad) and compare the process for both.
Now that we have our schematic completed, we will move the netlist in both tools to the layout editor and create our PCB. We will quickly touch on the placement, routing, and auto-routing steps for each tool. At the end of this penultimate class, we will have a full set of gerber drawings to send off to our PCB manufacturer.
In our final class, we will compare our finished board to the criteria we set forth and also compare the steps we had to take and differences for our two EDA tools, as well as for Altium Designer. We will look at the pros and cons of our different tools and be ready to choose our tools for our next project.
Charles J. Lord, PE is an embedded systems consultant and trainer with over 40 years' experience in system design and development in medical, military, and industrial applications. For the last twelve years, he has specialized in the integration of communication protocols into clients' products, including USB, Ethernet, and low-power wireless including ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, LoRa, and Thread. He has taught classes in these protocols for Freescale, Renesas, various universities and conferences including ESC and Arm TechCon. He has been a design partner with Freescale/NXP, Microchip, and Renesas. He also teaches webinars for various clients on IoT and embedded systems topics. He earned his BS in electrical engineering from N.C. State University in Raleigh, N.C. and provides training and consulting services through his company, Blue Ridge Advanced Design, in Asheville, N.C. He is a licensed professional engineer in NC and a senior member of the IEEE. In his volunteer work at the IEEE, he has served at many levels from local to regional to board committees. He is currently the chair of the IEEE Western NC Section, NC Council and was general chair of IEEE SoutheastCon 1995 and 2017